(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest: Good News and Bad News [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-12-20 Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw. OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments. This week we have pictures of the year, from the BBC, USA Today, NPR, and the New York Times. And a life in pictures, from the BBC: David Attenborough at the BBC Since 1954 the legendary documentary maker has been working with the BBC on some of the biggest and best-known natural history series on television. To mark 70 years in broadcasting, BBC History and BBC Archives have teamed up to celebrate his life in filmmaking. We begin with news from Asahi Shimbun: One woman's 56-year fight to free her innocent brother from death sentence Shaimaa Khalil When a court declared Iwao Hakamata innocent in September, the world's longest-serving death row inmate seemed unable to comprehend, much less savour the moment. "I told him he was acquitted, and he was silent," Hideko Hakamata, his 91-year-old sister, tells the BBC at her home in Hamamatsu, Japan. "I couldn't tell whether he understood or not." Another from the Asahi Shimbun: Bookstores are dwindling, but self-owned shops are on the rise By YURI NISHIDA Independent bookstores curated to their owners' individual tastes are continuing to crop up in spite of pressures threatening established shops to close their doors. Daisuke Ozaki, 42, is the owner of Brewbooks near JR Nishi-Ogikubo Station in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward. The 20-square-meter shop is lined with carefully selected literary works, poetry collections and other publications. From Sydney Morning Herald: ‘This is for all Australians’: Invaluable Aboriginal cultural collection reunited at Melbourne University By Will Cox At a climate-controlled storage facility in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, stringybark spears rest in white corflute boxes. On a bench in front of us, a fishing hook from West Cape York made from turtle carapace sits next to a stack of notes with illustrations, and a photograph of the man who wrote them: Donald Thomson, nonchalantly handling a taipan on the Cape York Peninsula in 1928. “He was a naturalist, a biologist, a zoologist, a botanist,” says Elaine Thomson, his daughter. He was also a vehement defender of Aboriginal rights. “He wanted to study people in their environment. To him, they were inseparable. You can’t know the people if you don’t know the environment in which they live, and what it means to them, and how it informs their history, and their social interaction.” And better news about a horrible story, from CBS News: From CNN: ‘Bizarre’ blob-headed fish and amphibious mouse among 27 new species found in Peru By Rosa Rahimi Researchers on an expedition in Peru have discovered 27 animal species new to science – among them a “blob-headed fish” and a type of semi-aquatic mouse. The survey was conducted by Conservation International, an environmental non-profit. It was carried out over a 38-day expedition in 2022 by a team working in the Alto Mayo landscape of northwestern Peru, which covers about 1.9 million acres of forest and agricultural areas and contains a diverse range of ecosystems. From the BBC: What are royal Christmas cards trying to tell us? Sean Coughlan It's become a seasonal tradition to seek the hidden message or symbolic meaning in the Christmas cards the royals send out, as they keep changing and reinventing the format. This year's card from King Charles and Queen Camilla shows them looking relaxed and maybe relieved - and there is a very personal significance behind this picture. Also from the BBC (a video): North London school welcomes farm animal guests In the run-up to Christmas, pupils at this school in North London are welcoming some very special guests. But it's not Santa and his nine reindeer - it's farm animals, including a ram, lambs and chickens. More news below the fold. We begin with news from Canada with two articles from the Toronto Star: Opinion | Forget the King and Spadina mess — streetcars are still the best way of getting around downtown Toronto By Shawn Micallef While visiting Toronto as a kid I was fascinated by the streetcars, but also worried. It was the old models then, the super heavy ones designed in the 1970s that glided through the city like street ships, their weight vibrating the sidewalks and making ker-chunk sounds the new, lighter ones can’t match. Coming from a city without streetcars, to me they seemed so futuristic, even if the technology was actually a century old. Old, but still quite useful. My unease arose at big intersections where two lines crossed and streetcars could turn in multiple directions, like Spadina at College, Dundas or Queen. All of that creates an incredible web of high voltage wires above the intersection, a kind of electric net. What if, I wondered, a skydiver went off course and landed there? They’d be in real trouble, you see, and my childhood Toronto visits were preoccupied with that worry. The second from The Star: Toronto Jewish girls school struck by gunfire again in third overnight shooting this year The shooting follows two other similar incidents at the school over the last seven months. By Kristjan Lautens A Jewish girls school in North York was struck by gunfire overnight for the third time this year, sparking outcry from community leaders as police in Toronto and areas north of the city plan to increase their presence at faith-based institutions. Around 2:30 a.m. Friday, Toronto police said suspects fired shots at Bais Chaya Mushka Elementary School on Chesswood Drive near Sheppard Avenue West from inside a vehicle before fleeing the area. 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